A Man in a Distant Field

by Theresa Kishkan

  “When the beautiful Pancratium maritimum arrived, wrapped in David’s monogrammed handkerchief, still damp, I couldn’t have been more surprised, particularly as he’d added the note that it grew profusely among the sand dunes. I forgot for a moment that he was not on a plant-collecting trip but at war. When we were notified of his death and given a date, I realized from his note that the plant must’ve been collected and put into the mailbag that same day. I kept going to the Botanic Gardens to see the living plant, thinking how dreadful it was to have your life bracketed in such a way: October 20, 1890 to August 28, 1915. To be contained within such an artificial frame when we always expected our three score and ten, and how like the brief lives of things grown under glass. David ought to have grown old gathering plants on the Sky Road with the wind and ocean and rainstorms. I am not putting this very well, but I feel you must know what I mean.”

  Declan could not think of anything to say to her at that moment, hearing the catch in her voice and seeing moistness in her eyes. He reached for her hand and patted it gently. When she had cried a little and dried her eyes with a handkerchief, he told her that he had gone to Canada so that he would not have to think of Eilis and his girls contained within the mound of earth marked by granite. “It seemed to me then to have nothing to do with who they were, and I could not bear it. Yet now, strangely, I am comforted by the sight of the stone. They have become something else to me, I am thinking. A source, maybe. And I don’t feel them confined anymore. I have planted my oar for them, as Odysseus did in his poem, so they will know where I’ve been and that I mean to farm our land again.”

  “Is that what you’ll do, Mr. O’Malley? Farm this land?”

  “Aye, I suppose I will. There have been O’Malleys at Tullaglas for centuries, with lives harder than mine, and losses aplenty. But please, call me Declan. Our families have been neighbours for nearly as long!”

  Tears dried, she smiled at him. “And will you call me Una? In Leenane, it’s Miss Fitzgerald this and Miss Fitzgerald that and sometimes I forget who I am with no one to call me by my name. Miss Fitzgerald is so obviously a spinster, and when I’m at Marshlands, I always feel like a girl of thirteen. So it would be so generous of you if you’d indulge me and let me be her!”

  “Una it is. A fine Irish name to be sure. If ye would not take offense, I could make ye a cup of tea if ye came back to the farm, but it’s only an old pan I have for the making and cups ye won’t have seen the likes of. It’s our own water, though, and sweet as ever there was.”

  “I would be honoured to have a cup of tea with you. It’s the tea I’m thirsty for, not a fine china cup.”

  They walked back in mist. Declan busied himself with the fire and kettle and produced two mugs of strong tea, offering milk from the Mannion’s cow. They drank their tea and then Una took her leave, asking Declan to visit her when he came down into Leenane.

  “Either I’ll be in and happy to give you tea or I’ll be sketching, in which case you can come in and make a cup for yourself if you like. If I knew ahead, I’d make sure to be there but this isn’t Dublin with regular post and even telephones now. Perhaps we could get messenger pigeons, Declan, to take notes over the mountain! That would be something, would it not?”

  He had not seen a woman like her for some time. She was handsome rather than pretty, an angular face with strong cheekbones and grey eyes, a confident way of talking, as though she expected to be taken seriously, and she was not worn in her person as were the women he was accustomed to speaking with. Hard work had not lined her face and chapped her hands, poor diet had not taken her teeth, and her clothing was not pieced together from whatever might be at hand. Briefly he put his hand to his hair, smoothed it a little, wondered if she had noticed that his shirt was missing three of its buttons and could certainly use a washing in creek water with good lye soap.

  The next time Declan walked down to Leenane to order some materials for his building project, he found himself noting plants as he passed the fields. Many of them he knew, of course, and he had always listened to Maire when she described a flower she had seen or an unusual tree. There had been a few books with plates in the school’s modest collection, and Maire was not shy about asking people who might know—an old woman famous for her simples, the dyers in Leenane who collected plants and barks for the vats of colour that the wool would be immersed in before weaving. Harder work to know a plant without its flower, he thought, bending down to examine some sticky leaves that he thought must be corn spurry. And the fleshy leaves growing out of a length of old wall would be house-leek. Down by the river the tall straps of iris were browning and the nests they concealed, in amongst themselves and the bulrushes, looked forlorn without the hovering blackbirds. Kingfishers nested along this river, too, but built tunnels in the steeper banks to conceal their young.

  He could not simply walk past the school as he had on the way home to Delphi. Voices buzzed from within the walls like bees in an industrious hive. He walked to the door and knocked tentatively. A young man in shirtsleeves, tie askew, opened the door and looked relieved. “I ought to be wearing my jacket of course, but the fire is fierce today and I was drilling them in the times table and got a bit excited. I am so pleased you are not the Inspector. Will you come in?”

  Declan began to introduce himself, but a chorus of children called his name as he entered the familiar classroom.

  “Ah, Mr. O’Malley, is it? I am so pleased to make your acquaintance, sir. The scholars are full of your lessons, the ones you taught. There is no end of reminders to me that you would have asked this of them, or would have expected them to know their sums before handing out a storybook. I am grateful for your mentorship, even if it has come to me second-hand, so to speak.”

  The children were delighted to see him. Mr. Kenny, the present master, allowed them to gather around him, leaving their slates on their desks, and stood back smiling. Declan was shown neat papers of handwriting, sketches of the classroom with its rows of long desks and rough benches, poems copied from books and surrounded with borders of pansies and traveller’s joy. He took his leave, wishing the present master well. Mr. Kenny followed him to the door.

  “I am so pleased to have met you, sir, and invite you to visit us at any time. There is a point I would like to discuss with you, it would be improper for me to say more just at present, and I wonder if I might come to you one evening? I am boarding with the Byrnes who are just by the Skeery bridge.”

  “Mr. Kenny, I can promise you a measure of whiskey, if not a sitting room in which to drink it. And a willing ear, to be sure. It is warming to see the children so settled and content, given the state of our country. I’ll say goodbye now, and bless ye.”

  He continued down the road to where it met Killary Harbour, the Bundorragha River having gathered into itself the waters of seven or eight smaller streams idling down Ben Gorm. A few boats were on the water, coming in from fishing. He watched a heron rise from the muddy shore and head towards the tall evergreens by Clogh where brown fields stood stripped of their forage by sheep down for the winter. It was landscape plainer in its bones than the one surrounding Oyster Bay but he saw it with his heart as well as his eyes. It was as though it took the fuss of those coastal rainforests, the lush growth of the estuary, to make this one clear to him. Now there was a reference point, a transparency to hold to the land of his birth, to make its contrasts evident, shaped by stone and a history of hardship.

  He noted, when passing, that Una’s fire was burning behind the shrubbery that kept her cabin hidden from the road. In Leenane, he went about his errands, calling into the shop for provisions, only what he could carry, and he ordered some windows from the builder, as well as other materials he would need before spring. It was arranged that the builder’s helper would bring the supplies by cart once they’d arrived from Galway and Cong. At the publican’s, he bought a bottle of whiskey; he’d found that a small measure of it before he slept helped his body to adjust more easily to the ground, lumpy
even with Mrs. O’Leary’s ticking, and the chilly air of the turf shed now that the dark season had arrived.

  He turned into the lane that led to the Fitzgerald demesne. He could see the ruin of the big house, the walls with their pretty wash of pink lime scorched and destroyed. Even the stable yard, where Una’s cousin had kept a pair of carriage horses as well as a hunter for himself and ponies for his children, had been ruined. Ivy was creeping up the side of the chimney, which still stood, as his own did; nettles flourished in the rose garden, though brown with frost. Before he could knock on the door of the groundskeeper’s cabin, Una was standing there on the threshold, smiling.

  “I saw you pass earlier and thought you might stop in on your way back to Delphi. It gave me time to bake some scones to offer you with a cup of tea!”

  Declan looked around the cabin. It was like many of the others of its sort in the area—a large room which was the sitting room with kitchen facilities at one end, doors leading off either side of this, and a narrow staircase rising to a second floor. But it was bigger than his own house had been and spoke of something more than hard country lives. It was furnished simply but comfortably: two chairs, covered in a faded rose-patterned chintz, faced each other and the fire with a low table in between them, a long pine table under one window with an assortment of chairs around it, some grander than others, a proper cooker with a hot-water reservoir to one side, wide sinks, cheerful braided rugs on the slate floors. Paintings hung on the walls and pots of bright leaves and late flowers graced almost every surface. A piano against a wall with photographs on its polished top. On the low table by the fire, a cloth had been laid with a napkin-covered plate, some cups, a jug of milk, a small dish with a square of butter, and a jar of jam. Declan realized he was very hungry, having done the walk to Leenane and this far back with only his morning porridge.

  “These are fine scones, Una!” he declared, buttering his fourth. “It’s been a long time since the morning porridge, and me with the walk to Leenane under my belt.”

  She smiled and took the plate away to replenish its contents, wetting the tea again from the kettle suspended on a hook above the fire. After she had given him more scones, Una went to a dresser on the other side of the room and removed a folder from a drawer. She returned to her chair by the fire and handed the folder to Declan.

  “These are some of the drawings I did of plants on Ben Gorm. You saw the rose, of course, when we first met, but I thought you might be interested in the others. I’ve added some wash to a few.”

  Declan opened the folder and carefully lifted the first sheet. The drawing was done in pencil but he recognized immediately the furze of the open fields. The detail was impressive, from the spines to the veining on the flowers. Such shading and delicacy of line! He could almost smell that odour that Eilis remarked was near the almond essence she put into the cakes at Christmas. The next drawing was a clump of marsh marigolds and again there was the fine detail, even to a bit of a withered leaf. Inset showed an open blossom with a small fly entering to drink, while the anther waited, heavy with pollen. Each drawing had tiny notes alongside, describing light, colour, time of day, surrounding landscape.

  “These are truly fine, Una!” He looked through the folder at what remained: bell heather and bilberry, willow herb, pelli-tory-of-the-wall, and hemp agrimony. “Did ye mean to paint them as well? I see that ye have these notes with them so, and these little patches of colour.”

  “Ah, well, yes. I have painted some, in watercolour, but have meant to do more, and will, once I’ve my studio set up. It’s not easy to cart my painting supplies to the sites where the plants are, although I do take a small box of paints to make those small palettes to remember, and notes of course, though even with notes, it’s difficult to paint from memory. I intend to do more of them, of course. Some artists are now taking photographs, and there is even some thought that the photographs might well take the place of drawings and so forth, but I have yet to see a photograph that manages to get the plant in all its dimensions. I never use one single plant for a model, you see, but study many of them to get a sense of the possibilities of variance in form. Soils and weathers can affect the depth of colour, the habit of the plant. Looking at many will allow me to develop a prototype, you might call it, or the ideal plant, perhaps.”

  Declan enjoyed hearing her speak of her work. She obviously knew a lot about the wild plants and loved them; listening to her, it was like hearing a version of a story, one he hadn’t heard yet but which made the story he did know larger and more various. There was a priest when he’d been away at school who believed that no one could know Ireland who didn’t know Gaelic, that it was a way to understand the country in all its complexity. Declan had been interested in this, knowing that the ancient methods of land use in his own area made sense when you knew the Gaelic names for the fields themselves and the common pastures, and that a place itself echoed its history in its name: Baile, which had come to mean town but previously indicated both settlement and the landhold together, Dun, where a fort had been, Doolough or Dhulough, the dark lake, even Leenane, its Gaelic name Lionan Cinn Mhara, which meant something like “a place filled by tides at the head of the bay.”

  She showed him where she worked at present, a table pushed up against the window in one of the two small rooms on the second floor. A microscope, partly covered with a tea towel, stood close to the window. Una described her plan to have the interior wall knocked out and skylights installed to let in more light. Shelves held paper and tubes of pigment, as well as books, jars of liquids, and powders. There were jam pots filled with brown stems hung with seed pods, branches of hawthorn and rowan with bunches of berries beginning to dry out and wrinkle, clumps of grasses, a collections of nests, the fragile skull of a bird. A few framed paintings of flowers hung on the walls, and a deep cabinet took up half the length of the room: it was her herbarium, she explained, where she kept her dried plants, pressed and mounted. A tray with several cups, a teapot, some dry crusts of bread: it was evident Una spent a good deal of time in this room, and Declan could see how a larger space would make it easier to spread her work out, how more light would make the new room congenial and bright. He wanted to see everything, to understand about everything, but he realized he was getting tired and thought of the long walk ahead of him.

  When he took his leave, he asked her to stop for him the next time she was sketching in his area. He wanted to know more about the plants on the mountain he had known all his life. She stood in the doorway and waved until he was beyond the Aasleagh Falls, the smoke from her fire visible above the wych-elms and sycamores by the river.

  When he returned to his shed, he found himself seeking his Odyssey. Because of weather and the lack of a good place to spread out his papers, he had not been working on his translation for some time, although sometimes he would take the Greek text out to puzzle through a passage he was reminded of. This day it was Penelope’s dream he had thought about as he’d walked the last mile or so. He found the lines and read them over and over, wondering for the life of him why the images kept appearing before his inner eye.

  A message was contained there, about husbands and mourning, but he didn’t know how to take it into his life. Take what was blessed and good, and expect the worst? Zeus would appear in the form of an eagle and take the soft geese away? Around his walls, tall grasses rustled in the wind off Fin Lough, where the wild ducks swam in the reeds, fat with stolen grain. One of these days, Miceal O’Leary would appear on his threshold with a string of them, tied by their wings, offering one for his fire.

  True to his word, Liam Kenny came by an evening later. Over whiskey, he told Declan something of his background. A Galway man, he had been raised in a Republican household and his father had been a member of one of the Flying Columns near Oughterard. His education had been interrupted at times by his father’s imprisonment, but he had completed his teacher training and Bundorragha was his first school. He told Declan he had been approached, shortly
after he’d arrived, by some men, Irregulars, who knew his father; it was assumed he’d assist with Connemara Division ambushes.

  “I am not saying of course what my reply to them was. They are an active lot. Mostly they’ve been trenching roads, which the Nationals repair soon enough though the Republicans have had the benefit of the Galway County Surveyor among their supporters, which has helped a great deal with technical knowledge. There has also, I understand, been the occasional bridge. But the lads have made the hills their territory, sir, and like you, they know every wrinkle, every bush of gorse. No one would hurt you, I am thinking, but I want to tell you that it’s not altogether a safe thing to walk at night as you evidently have always done.”

  Declan could not respond. The hills had always held their secrets—a still where poteen was made by moonlight; an outlaw; the remnants of a fire ring or field boundary pre-dating the Famine. He had walked at night because it was peaceful, because the work of a schoolmaster required long hours, because he might have needed assistance with a difficult calving, or simply because the long-eared owls were to be heard in the conifers near Tully on March evenings and he would accompany Maire to listen to them. And more recently he walked at night because the dark came so soon and daylight could not contain all the tasks to be done—he might walk to O’Learys to borrow a tool or to the shores of Dhulough where he knew a certain shape of rock might be found, moonlight a frequent companion.